Coming to a TV set near you: broadband Internet video, says Emerging Media Dynamics president
Aug 14, 2007 2:56 PM
Emerging Media Dynamics president Cynthia Brumfield calls Internet video “a destabilizing development for everybody in the television business.”
By the end of this year, 12 million U.S. homes will have the ability to connect their television sets to a broadband Internet connection and watch video from the comfort of their living rooms or bedrooms, according to a new report from research firm Emerging Media Dynamics.
That could be a significant step in transforming what’s been called the “lean forward” experience of watch video on a computer screen into something more akin to the “sit back” experience of watching television. While the ramifications of that transformation are unclear, it’s likely that watching Internet video on home TV sets will help to further mainstream this emerging medium and bring a new level of interactivity to the mainstay of home entertainment in America.
IPTV Update spoke with Cynthia Brumfield, president of Emerging Media Dynamics and author of “Delivering Internet Video to TV Sets” to learn more.
IPTV Update: Your report identifies five major hardware types seeking to bridge the Internet to the living room or bedroom television. Could you briefly describe each?
Cynthia Brumfield: Part of the role of being an analyst is trying to categorize these very complex media developments in a way that people can come to grips with them. When we came to this issue of Internet to TV sets, the first question was how many ways are there to get Internet video to the TV set. We came up with five categories, and they are all in play today in some fashion.
The first and the biggest are gaming consoles. You’ve got the Xbox 360, the Sony PlayStation, the Nintendo Wii and other platforms that connect to TV sets that also have the capability in some fashion — either now or very soon — of connecting to the Internet.
The second category I characterize as special appliances and extenders. This is a very diverse category in the sense that the kind of appliances and technology providers that fall into this general rubric are very different. We have companies as diverse as Tivo, which pioneered the PVR in the digital video recording realm. You have Apple TV, which is something designed specifically to enable you to watch your PC-based video on a TV set. Then you have Sling Media’s SlingCatcher, which is causing a lot of buzz and apparently will be launched in September or October. It serves very much the same kind of specific purpose as Apple TV, which is to help you watch Internet video on your TV. So the special appliances and extenders really cover a wide range of different kinds of devices and pieces of hardware.
Then you have a category that is somewhat controversial, but we considered it to be very important. It is video distribution over IP. You’ve got Verizon and AT&T both trying to deliver video signals over an IP or Internet Protocol-based network that really uses the same technology and, in some cases, actually uses the Internet for distributing video to home users.
But what they are doing for the most part is delivering what you might expect from a satellite provider or cable provider: multichannel video services. It’s not the kind of Internet video you would expect to watch on You Tube or any other user-generated site or any other broadcast network video programming site. It literally is cable television or satellite television, but over Internet-based protocol platform.
The reason we included that in there is that both Verizon and AT&T are experimenting with ways, since they use IP protocol-based technology, of delivering video from the Internet to the TV set in parallel with or along side the multichannel video services that are like cable or satellite services.
The fourth category we call all-purpose digital TV set tops. This is a new category. It is something that has come about as a result of a federal mandate that requires operators to remove the security technology in standard set-top boxes so that consumer electronics manufacturers can make boxes people can buy. They can buy them and take them from cable system to cable system. The fact that these boxes can be available at retail has spawned a new concept of boxes that are all-in-one, that not only enable the delivery of multichannel video to your TV set and personal recording, but also can connect you to the Internet or wirelessly to your PC.
There is a box that is creating a lot of buzz called the Digeo Moxi Multiroom, DMR. Digeo was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and they are looking to sell these boxes, which are very high end — in the $600 to $800 price range — that will give you everything from HD reception and translation to Internet connectivity, to personal video recording to all kinds of advanced interactive program guides.
The fifth category is all-purpose high-end TVs, which takes this concept of the set- top and plug it directly into the TV set. HP has something called the MediaSmart TV that is on the market and is an example of the kind of device that can bring Internet to your TV set.
Then there is a sixth catch-all category called “other,” and there certainly are random pieces of hardware and software and technology that are under development and don’t fit these previous categories. You may be familiar with SanDisk’s USBTV device, which literally is a USB device that can enable you to copy video from your PC and plug it into your TV. You transfer content by Sneakernet from one device to another.
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